Recent Patents on Nanotechnology - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2015

The development of new fibrilar materials based on electrospinning (ES) technique has a notable history of nearly four centuries of discoveries and results. The eletrospinning manufacturing is one of the most widely reported methods for nanofiber (NF) manufacturing, providing security, high quality and productivity. In spite of the first patent about electrospinning has been applied in April 5th, 1900 by John Francis Cooley, a historical perspective (since 1600s) about this amazing discovery represents an important step for future applications. Nanofibers have been considered one of the top interesting fundamental study objects for academicians, and greatest intriguing business materials for modern industry. As a consequence, lucrative organizations and companies have explored the relevance of nanofibers. In this paper, the quantity of published manuscripts and patent inventions is presented and the correlation of research activities to the production of new electrospinning materials is shown. China and the United States have been leading in electrospinning and nanofibers development. The company triumph is mostly dependent on applications improvement relevant for broader business society. A dramatic rise of interest in nanofibers produced by electrospinning technique has been confirmed due to the publication data, author’s affiliation, keywords, and essential characterization procedures. Is has been shown that the number of publications on electrospinning and nanofibers researches from academic institutions is higher than industrial laboratories. More than 1,891 patents using the term “electrospinning” and 2,960 with the term “nanofibers” according to the European Patent Office at title or abstract have been filed around the world up to 2013. These numbers just continue to increase along with worldwide ES-related sales. Curiously, for the same period 11,973 electrospinning documents and 18,679 nanofibers-related (mainly manuscripts) were published considering the Scopus database with the same terms in the title, abstract or using keywords. Thus, statistically, there are more published manuscripts worldwide than patents for both keywords.

From their discovery half a century ago and the subsequent appreciation of their clinical utility, liposomes currently hold a recognized position in the mainstream of drug delivery systems. Conventional techniques for liposome preparation and size reduction are simple to implement and do not require sophisticated equipment. However, most of them are not easy to scale-up for industrial liposome production. With several liposomal formulations already on the market, and more in final clinical trials, the industrial scale production of liposomes has become reality, and so the range of liposome preparation methods has been extended by a number of techniques which are increasingly attractive, such as microfluidic hydrodynamic focusing, supercritical fluid processing, freeze-drying and spray-drying. Some of these new techniques generally represent advancements of the conventional methods allowing for scale-up, better reproducibility and process control. This review summarizes patents in the last decade offering new techniques for production of liposomes as related to their application in drug delivery.

Eye is a vital sense organ of our body and any disorder can lead to serious medical implications that may put great financial burden on patient and their family. Effective drug delivery to the eye is a challenging proposition for the pharmaceutical scientist. Eye drops have been globally accepted as a formulation for anterior segment applications. On one hand it is widely used owing to its convenience but is also associated with some limitations in terms of desired pharmacological and pharmacokinetic profile, dosing frequency, systemic untoward effects, patient noncompliance, low drug bioavailability due to transient contact time, rapid washout by tearing and nasolacrimal drainage. The need to overcome these major issues related to ocular pharmacotherapy has been long recognized. Several novel nanocarriers including nanolipid based carrier systems have been widely explored and investigated for ophthalmic applications. These include solid lipid nanoparticles (SLN), nanostructured lipid carriers (NLC), liposomes, in situ gels, niosomes, mucoadhesive systems and discomes. Since lipids have similar structure to human cell lipids, their biodegradable, non-toxic and biocompatible profile are particularly useful. Additionally, they also offer protection against drug degradation, impart controlled drug release characteristics and site specific delivery. This review explores the potential feasibility of lipid component in formulation of nanomedicine for ophthalmic delivery and reports the clinical findings in order to improve the ocular pharmacotherapy. Here, we also discussed for patents related to the topic.

This paper presents a technological prospection on nanotechnologies applied to the petroleum industry through the creation of a worldwide overview regarding scientific paper publications and patents concerning that business, with the purpose of identifying the main trends on research and development (R&D), the annual evolution, as well as the key agents and countries involved. In this research, it was possible to verify the presence of services oil companies, like Baker, Schlumberger and Halliburton. In scientific paper publications, it was possible to observe university departments, related to petroleum studies, from different countries, as Thailand, China, USA, Iran.

Au nanoparticles can be prepared inside biological solutions and incorporated in special molecules for their transport through blood, drugs and proteins up to the tumour sites or directly injected in their volume when it is possible. The Au nanoparticles are biocompatible and can be accepted locally in the organism also at relatively high concentrations. The use of Au nanoparticles injected in the tumour site enhances significantly the effective atomic number of the medium, depending on the used concentration, and consequently the proton and electron energy loss and the X-ray absorption coefficient determining an increment of the local absorbed dose during radiotherapy. Traditional radiotherapy using electrons, X-rays and gamma rays, and innovative protontherapy can benefit the increment of the effective atomic number of the tissue in the presence of Au-nanoparticles embedded in the tumour volume with an adaptive up-take procedure. This method decreases the dose released to the healthy tissues permitting a better cantering of the irradiated targets and shielding the healthy tissue placed behind the tumour. The presented theoretical study approach permits to evaluate an enhancement of the radiotherapy dose of the order of 1 % using 60 MeV protons, of the order of 10% using 6 MeV electrons and of the order of 100 % using 100 keV X-ray photons. Here, we also disccused for patents relaed to the topic.

This paper presents an overview of current situation in nano-alloys investigations based on bibliometric and patent analysis. Bibliometric analysis data, for the period 2000 to 2013, were obtained using Scopus database as selected index database, whereas analyzed parameters were: number of scientific papers per year, authors, countries, affiliations, subject areas and document types. Analysis of nano-alloys patents was done with specific database, using the International Patent Classification and Patent Scope for the period 2003 to 2013. Information found in this database was the number of patents, patent classification by country, patent applicators, main inventors and publication date.

This work presents the manufacturing and potential application of the CuS films in recent literature and patents and then focus on the chemical bath depostion of p-CuS: Cu+and n-CuS: Sn4+ filmsat room temperature by controlling S/Cu molar ratio in the bath solution and doping Cu+ and Sn4+ cations, respectively. The CuS:Cu+and CuS:Sn4+ films with S/Cu molar ratio larger and less than the stoichiometric ratio showed p-type and n-type electrical conduction, respectively, and low electrical resistivity of~1.31×10-3 Ω·cm and ~0.73-0.80×10-3 Ω·cm, respectively. Moreover, the films had the average transmittance of ~20.1-30.1 % in 290-1100 nm. The direct allowed band gaps and indirect allowed optical band gap energies of the films were estimated to be in the ranges of ~2.58-2.63 eV and ~1.6-1.78 eV, respectively. The extinction coefficient, refractive index, dielectric constant, and optical conductivity of the films were calculated with the transmittance and reflectance spectra.